What the trade records show
A New York Times investigation published on 6 September, based on trade records analysed with the data firm ImportGenius, found that Aivres Systems — the American subsidiary of blacklisted Chinese server maker Inspur Group — shipped more than $3bn of computers containing Nvidia’s Blackwell chips to intermediaries in Southeast Asia. Between April 2024 and February 2026, the Times reported, Aivres exported at least $5.6bn of advanced technology out of the United States to the region, ending up in data centres serving Chinese firms including Alibaba and ByteDance.
None of it appears to have broken the letter of American export law. That is the finding.
How the gap opened
The US Commerce Department added Inspur Group to its entity list in March 2023 over accusations that it had helped build supercomputers for the Chinese military. Two months later, in May 2023, Inspur’s US subsidiary changed its name from Inspur Systems Inc to Aivres Systems Inc. It kept operating from Fremont, California, out of a 270,000-square-foot facility.
Aivres itself was never added to the list. As a US-incorporated company it could lawfully buy Nvidia hardware and resell it, provided each individual shipment met export rules — which, on the record so far, they did. Entity-list restrictions attach to named companies, not to corporate families.
The second loophole is remote access
Even where a chip stays put, the compute does not. Restrictions govern where a GPU may be physically shipped; they do not, for the most part, govern who may rent time on it once it has landed somewhere permitted. A customer in China can reach a Blackwell rack sitting in Malaysia or Indonesia without importing anything.
The Wall Street Journal reported separately that it had tracked 2,300 Nvidia Blackwell chips to a Chinese AI company by way of an Indonesian telecoms provider. Crypto Briefing reported that Aivres sold 32 server racks holding roughly 2,300 Nvidia GB200 processors to Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison in November 2025 for about $100m, and that it prices its AI server platforms roughly 30% below comparable Western and Taiwanese systems.
Nvidia has already started pruning
Nvidia has not commented on Aivres directly, but it has been tightening who it will sell to. The company has cut more than half the authorised AI chip buyers on its lists in Singapore, Malaysia and Japan under a whitelist programme that admits only firms able to demonstrate they have no Chinese parent, Chinese capital or Chinese end users.
What to watch
Inspur Group was added to the US Department of Defense’s Section 1260H list in June 2026, a separate designation from the Commerce entity list. Whether Aivres is itself listed — and whether Washington moves to cover corporate affiliates and remote compute access rather than named exporters and physical shipments — is the question this reporting puts in front of regulators. Trump and Xi Jinping are due to meet on 24 September, with chip controls among the subjects both sides have said will be discussed.
